The Hewlett Foundation Blog

As part of our Grantmaker Speaker Series, Kevin Starr of the Mulago Foundation spoke to our staff about his organization's philanthropic model. Mulago funds organizations "built around a big idea and focused on maximum social impact" in order to help meet the basic needs of very poor people.

Kevin Starr "had a perfectly good career in medicine when he stumbled into philanthropy in 1994." When his friend and mentor Rainer Arnhold died suddenly, Arnhold's family asked Starr to support his legacy through the work of the Mulago Foundation. Since 2003, Mulago's Rainer Arnhold fellowship program has helped social entrepreneurs "turn good ideas into lasting change at scale."

The Hewlett Foundation Blog

As part of our Grantmaker Speaker Series, Joel Fleishman of Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy visited the Foundation to discuss spend-down foundations. While the Hewlett Foundation is intended to operate in perpetuity, a growing number of foundations plan to grant all of their assets within a specific timeframe.

Mr. Fleishman served from 1993-2003 as president of the Atlantic Philanthropic Services Company, the U.S. program staff for the Atlantic Philanthropies, which is scheduled to spend down by 2016. During this session, he discussed his reflections on the advantages and limitations of spend-down foundations as compared to perpetual foundations.

The Hewlett Foundation Blog

As part of our Grantmaker Speaker Series, Melanie Cervantes and Quinn Delaney of Akonadi Foundation visited the Foundation to discuss their concept of "ecosystem grantmaking." Their approach focuses on a"diverse web of relationships among communities, organizations and political formations" in order to support movement building and social change.

The Hewlett Foundation Blog

The Hewlett Foundation has long been associated with the term strategic philanthropy. But respectful debate is a critical and healthy aspect of any field. When our president Larry Kramer arrived, he immersed himself in the field of philanthropy and learned a lot about the different ways of approaching philanthropy. He thought it would be valuable to continually expose the Hewlett community to these different approaches as well. As a result, we’ve started hosting a series of lunchtime talks where our staff—and other foundations and grantees—can explicitly hear from those who have different perspectives on philanthropy. This has turned out to be a really interesting exercise.

To date, we’ve been lucky to hear from individuals who challenged our assumptions about what effective philanthropy looks like (Bill Somerville of Philanthropic Ventures Foundation, whose talk is featured below), offered grantmaking models that differ from our own (Quinn Delaney and Melanie Cervantes of Akonadi Foundation), or helped us think about the role of foundations in a larger context (Rob Reich of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society). The ideas they, and many others, offered are far too rich to convey in a single blog post, and we’ll be sharing many of these talks here on the blog over the coming weeks and months.

Having spent the time (and more importantly, other people’s time) gathering these different perspectives, what do we take away from it all so far? We can’t speak on behalf of the entire Foundation, but a few themes stand out for us:

Philanthropy is full of healthy tension, and we often talk about the poles: academics versus those “on the ground;” pursuing strategic goals versus investing in organizations; investing in organizations versus investing in people; quick and easy grant applications versus strong due diligence; strategic philanthropy versus responsive philanthropy. While it’s easy to talk about the extremes, most of the time, we’re trying to find our way between them. Clear goals and strategies are important, so that the sum of our grantmaking adds up to more than just the individual grants—but we also want to build strong organizations and form true partnerships. Grantees are not contractors. We need to create processes that are easy on grantees, but while being responsible stewards. We need solid research and evidence, but we also need to listen to and honor experience and wisdom. By recognizing the extremes, we can better find our place along the spectrum.

We need to find even better ways of getting dissenting feedback. In the invitations we give to our speakers, we ask them to challenge us in our work. However, we have realized two things: 1) it remains hard to get honest, dissenting feedback in a foundation—even from other foundations, and 2) we desperately need it. The best conversations have occurred when speakers had something critical to say, or questioned our approach. It may be asking a lot of one speaker to challenge a roomful of Hewlettonians, but we need to find other avenues for getting feedback on our strategies and processes, and to get that feedback from a wider group of individuals—not just friends and family. The blog is a great forum for many things, but it can lead to speech-writing rather than real conversation and dialog.

We need to create more spaces to integrate the voices of constituents and communities. Many of the speakers brought up the importance of incorporating local knowledge into grantmaking decisions. This can be challenging for a foundation whose work is often at the national and international policy level. But it’s still critically important. In 2014, we are continuing our speaker series with an additional focus on constituent voice and both our Philanthropy and Global Development and Population programs are exploring grants to support this type of work. We’re looking forward to learning more about how we can do this successfully.

So what’s changed as a result of what we’ve heard from others so far? Well, truthfully, many things remain the same. While it’s good to think about the merits of providing only project support or only general operating support, we continue to believe in retaining the flexibility to provide both depending on what’s appropriate. And we continue to believe in setting goals and strategies for our work. But there are also things we plan to do differently. We will be starting some internal conversations around how to continually evolve our strategy development processes, so that it incorporates more constituent voice and less false precision. We have been thinking about how to get better feedback, and looking hard at what we want to do differently based on our recent Grantee Perception Report. We are also thinking about how we can streamline and “right-size” our grant application and reporting forms, so as not to be so burdensome on our grantees or ourselves.

Although the Hewlett Foundation is not planning to depart from strategic philanthropy any time soon, these speakers have been and will continue to be important in helping us question our assumptions and sharpen our thinking. Hearing from those outside our walls is a critical component of continuous learning, and we look forward to sharing our thoughts with you. We also hope that whether at philanthropy conferences or in your individual conversations with funders, you too find ways to spark healthy debate about philanthropy.

The Hewlett Foundation Blog

As part of our Grantmaker Training Series, Bill Somerville of Philanthropic Ventures Foundation talked to Hewlett Foundation staff about "Investing in People." During his talk, Bill challenged us to reduce the paperwork burden we place on our grantees and focus on people we believe can make a difference rather than our own concepts and strategies.